amorpheus

It's been a while. I missed you. I moved out of my basement apartment like a moleman emerging from his subterranean netherworld, his poorly developed eyes not ready for the assault of sunlight streaming through his newly acquired windows. I had been without Internet access, which is why I hadn't updated. I've had things that I'd wanted to write about building up. Let's see how much of it I can remember:

- Right now, I am recovering from an illness that has consumed most of this past week - growing from hurts-to-swallow to hurts-to-breathe then mercifully back to hurts-to-swallow. It was the kind of infirmity that makes dreams seam realer and reality more like a dream. In this state, I came to a deep, spiritual realization - I like to have a strict separation between dreams and reality. In my fight against the disease, I drank a great deal of orange juice. Checking the cartons, I consumed well over 10 times my daily requirement of vitamin C each day. I started to wonder how much orange juice I would have to drink before I developed a "healing factor" like Wolverine of the X-Men. It still hasn't happened, but I'm hopeful.

- The landlord has me showing prospective tenants the apartment adjacent to mine, as I am in the building more often than he is. I don't really mind. The only thing that bothers me is that with the landlord never around, it sometimes feels like I'm pretending to be gay for nothing.

- At a party, I danced with a stranger for a while. We talked and laughed. Then she left without telling me she was leaving. I was a little upset about that, but realized that she didn't really have any obligation towards me, and she was free to ditch me at her leisure. A little later, a woman came up to me and said, "You were dancing with my roommate." I acknowledged that I was, and she said, "You better take good care of her." I grumbled, "If I ever see her again, I'll keep that in mind." So now I think another two people I'll never see again hate me.

- You have to turn a cross all the way upside-down for it to be sacrilegious, but you only have to turn a pentagram 36 degrees. If you draw a pentagram on the ground, whether it is inverted depends on which way you're facing. So, theoretically, if you turn just a little bit during your ritual, it could reverse your spell.

- If someone is "fighting fire with fire," that means he's doing something wrong. You're not supposed to use your enemy's tactics against them. People really should stop using that expression as if it's a good idea, like, "We have to fight fire with fire! It's our only hope!" Whenever I hear someone talking like that, I am afraid that there is a firefighter somewhere who, familiar with the idiom, is trying to extinguish a fire by setting it on fire and can't figure out why it isn't working. "The flamethrower has no effect! This must be some sort of invincible super-fire!"